Brennan B2 2TB Black HiFi - Hard Disk CD Ripper, Storage and Player with Sonos, Bluetooth, Spotify, YouTube, Internet Radio, Stereo Power Amplifier, NAS, Wav, Lossless (FLAC) and MP3.

I don’t often write reviews of products, but I am really enjoying the Brennan B2. I am one of these guys who has refused to get rid of his CD collection, in the hopes of something like this. I know that I can rip my CDs to my computer, but this has a grace and utility that I like.I have wanted to rip all my CDs for a long time. I have thousands. The Brennan made it easy and seamless. There were some CDs that the data base didn’t have listings for, but that is the not the fault of the unit, it is at the mercy of a public database and relies on users to upload new material. Depending on your taste of music, you may have to type a little more from time to time.First, if you have a some good speakers, or want to hook it to something it is great. I have this hooked up to a Monoprice tube hybrid amp, and some Bose bookshelf speakers for use in my home office, and it sounds great.FLAC is a great format for having lossless audio. I have a Cowon Plenue that I use for portable lossless. The Brennan works as a NAS, which means that I can physically pull the files from my desk top and transfer the FLAC files to my Player, and that is really something that I was looking for.At the end of the day, it is not perfect. But it is an extremely good solution for what it is. If you goal is to rip all your CDs in a lossless format to a stand alone player that will hold them all, and make your music easily accessible I think it is a great solution, and I love it.Pros / Good points1. Nice interface on other devices such as phone tablet or computer.2. Easy to navigate and find music.3. Easy to just play random.4. Will hold a lot of music.5. Acts as a Network drive.6. It is updatable and upgradable from a software perspective.Cons / Issues1. It is not a completely refined product where it is an open computer (See number 6 above)2. It is not grounded well. I live in Illinois, and it is EXTREMELY dry here in winter, and it makes for a tun of static electricity. As I have carpet in my basement, I often build a charge, and when I touch the unit, with the snap of static electricity it tends to cause the unit to hang. BRENNAN update your power supply to a three prong plug for North America, and fix your electrical problem, as I can imagine this potentially damaging the computer eventually. Luckily I can ground myself on my properly grounded amp casing first before I touch the Brennan, now I have learned.3. WIFI dongle is slow, so file transfer of from it as a network drive is slow.

I bought this product to fill a specific need. I have approximately 300 CDs and they are spread out all over the house. Because of this I’ve bought CDs that I already own and I often forget what I already have. In addition, it is a real pain to find that CD and load it up and then remember to put it away.I decided to find a streaming device that would copy all of my CDs in a high quality format and play them back so I could listen to through my existing stereo system. Most of the systems/devices out there are over $2,000 – more than I wanted to pay. I also wanted the ability to copy the albums to a thumb drive as MP3s to listen to in the car. The window of available systems was getting smaller and smaller.Then somehow I stumbled across the Brenna B2 system. Essentially it’s a small computer connected to a hard drive with ripping, sorting and playing software and, all for under $700. You could probably set up a similar thing on a computer, but a dedicated media server computer would probably run around the same cost plus it would need a monitor – more hassle than I want. I wanted easy!Back to the Brennan - I’ve only had this device for a month or so but here is my initial take-away.First, the manual helps you connect this to your stereo and get it started. There is a Wi-Fi USB drive in the back of the unit and you need to connect this unit to your home router for optimum use. Mine took maybe a few minutes to connect and you’re off. I connected it to my stereo (no cord included – yours may differ so look at the Brenna website and amazon to order for your particular setup) but you can also use the USB Bluetooth dongle and connect straight to a Bluetooth speaker or even external bookshelf speakers as it has a built-in amplifier.To start using the system, the ripping is incredibly easy. On the average, it takes less than 5 minutes from the time you insert the CD, select the album name, let it rip off the contents and it spits the disk back out.The next part is a bit more time consuming. I’ve got my unit set to rip the CD and store in both a high quality FLAC and MP3 formats. You’ve got several compression options – FLAC with or without MP3 and several MP3 quality settings with no FLAC. I choose FLAC as it is the highest quality for my stereo PLUS the MP3 for my cars radios and Harley-Davidson motorcycle radio to use. This step takes about another hour for the system to modify/compress each album into the 2 formats. I typically load in about 8 disks before I go to bed and they’ve been compressed by the next morning. The first time I loaded about 25 disks – big mistake – two days later and still compressing! And you can’t listen and compress at the same time so best to get the compressing over with. Every time you listen the compressing pauses and after 5 minutes of no activity is starts compressing again until complete.The unit interface is a bit clunky. It works okay for ripping, but you can download their app and that is the easiest way to pick albums or playlists to listen to. I’ve got an Apple phone and my wife an Android phone and they both work pretty much the same. More on that later.Here is where it gets tricky and a bit frustrating. You can easily backup the entire drive to an external hard drive – mine took about one overnight session to complete. But it only backs up the FLAC songs as viewable, it says the MP3 files are hidden – what?? But putting MP3s on a thumb drive is not as easily done. First you have to create what is called a ‘Playlist’. In essence, you create a list and give it a name, such as Christmas Albums and then you go out to your downloaded list and one by one add albums (or songs) to that playlist. I have 26 Christmas albums and it took maybe 8 to 10 minutes to find each one and attach to the playlist. You don’t actually load them into the playlist, it appears the playlist is more like a tag that attaches to that album or song. You can have the same album in multiple playlists. For example, a country Christmas album can be in both a Christmas and a County playlist.Once you’ve created a playlist, you stick a thumb drive in USB slot C in the rear of the unit and then go to playlist and select download MP3s from that playlist to the thumb drive. Pretty easy and it transfers fairly quickly. The negative – the only way to backup all of your albums as MP3 is to create a playlist and give it a name like ALL ALBUMS, then attach every CD to this and finally do an MP3 export to thumb drive. This seems a bit tedious. If I find an easier way I’ll pass it along, but for now that’s the only way I’ve discovered.Another negative, about 1 out of every 10 disks can’t find be found on the internal CD database. Millions of albums are in the database but a lot aren’t. And often an obscure album it finds and a popular album is missing – go figure?! You can pull up the system interface on the app but I’ve found it easier to use your laptop to fix missing data. In essence the unit, when connected to your router, has a unique IP address. The screen of the unit will show that IP when you turn it on. Type that IP address on your computer and you can add album names, song names, etc; so that rare album that the system can’t find you can rename here. The system will typically give your unknown album a number which is the number of the album that is being loaded. For example, it you are ripping the 50th disk and it can’t find the title, it calls that album disk 50. After ripping 300 albums in about two weeks (a few nights a week plus weekends), I’m down to a box of 30 or so unknown CDs (unknown to Brennan that is) that I have to enter manually. I’d allow around 15 to 20 minutes an album to rename once ripped – if you want to enter each song name as well as an album name. As I was ripping, if the unit didn’t know the CD name and assigned it a number, I attached a sticky note to that disk with the given number to allow me to go back and fix it later.Last but by no means not least, the phone app at first appeared to be broken for both me and my wife. When you first open the app and pick an album, it shows the album and the songs on that album and lets you pick any album or song to play. However, the app lists another 10 to 20 songs below that from other albums? If you hit play, it plays your album and then a lot of other songs – not good! My own workaround is to click the IU web interface button on the top left of the app and select albums from that interface location and from there - no problems as all – it only plays your album. If you all have a different experience please let me know – it should not have this problem. Until I discovered I could pick albums from the IU web interface instead of the app interface it almost made the entire system a no-go. I was ready to return it! (I'd give it a 5 star rating if this worked better)A lot of stuff to learn and it feels a bit experimental at times, but overall I love the unit – please fix the app! A side note – some reviewers talk about heat - my unit can be on for days and it does not run hot as all – often just a little bit warm. The newer units do have an on-off switch in the back – easy to use.Also check out their website – there is one on a UK site and another just called thebrennan.com. The manual is weak so read both websites and download the ‘Menu Summary’ which is a great go-to tool.Happy listening!60 DAY UPDATE:I'm still extremely happy with this unit. I've labeled all of my CDs the unit could not find on the internal database and have everything labeled. I bought an external 1TB HD and did a full back-up. I also bought multiple 64 GB thumb drives and have full MP3 copies for both cars and the motorcycle. 350 albums converted to highest quality MP3s is about 28 GB. The machine can also export a pdf of all CDs on the HD. I keep a copy on my phone for future music purchases - no more duplicates. Still no unit over-heating, the app works reasonably well and we love listening to albums we forget we had! No regrets.6 month update:Still going strong - over 500 albums as we added our books on CD as well. The unit plays great and it's in constant use. Still no regrets.3 Year Update:Still love this gadget,use it almost every day of the week. Close to 600 albums and still working perfectly.

I really wanted the Brennan for a number of reasons - primarily because I wanted to control and organize the music from a computer. The WiFi hook-up was very frustrating. I followed all instructions and all I got was NO NETWORK when I tried to connect it to network. It scanned available networks just fine but wouldn't connect. I tried it on three different networks with three different routers. Eventually I noted somewhere in the Brennan literature (In small print) that the WiFi dongle only worked with a 2.4 ghz network and not 5.0 ghz. My routers are all dual bandwidth router (I think most are these days) so I simply disabled the 5.0 network on the router and the Brennan connected on the first try. Once connected I re-enabled the 5.0 network and everything is now working fine. Save yourself a lot of headache and make sure you only have a 2.4 network enabled when connecting for the first time. Now that it working properly I am extremely happy with it. Great product and works as advertised. The Web U.I. is very well done and easy to use.